Baking 101: Why We Use Unsalted Butter

I’m not shy about sharing my affection for butter, but you may have noticed in the recipes here that I’m very specific about how I like my butter. Sometimes melted and browned. Sometimes cold and cubed. Sometimes beaten with sugar and egg. Always though… most almost always.. UNSALTED! Yea, I get opinionated about my butter. We should talk about why.

Butter is typically made from cow’s milk and consists of mostly butterfats. Low-fat buttes are suspicious, at best. Butter is generally about 80% fat, with the remaining 20% consisting of water and milk solids.

You have a choice when you go to the grocery: salted or unsalted butter. If you’re thinking about slathering your butter on a warm baguette, you’ll want to reach for the salted butter. If you’re baking a cobbler, you’ll most definitely want to reach for the unsalted butter.

Here’s why:

Most importantly: unsalted butter ensures that you can control the amount of salt you add to your cakes, cookies and Fig and Almond Breakfast Cake. Different companies add different amounts of salt to their butter. How are we to know how salty our butter is, and how we should adjust the salt in the recipe? It’s too much of a guessing game. Removing the salt from the butter equation puts us in control of salting. Control is very important when it comes to flavor.

When a recipe calls for unsalted butter, that means that the salt levels in the recipe account for no other salt source. If all you have salted butter, try cutting the instructed salt amount in half.

Also, salt is a preservative. Salted butter has a longer shelf life than unsalted butter. That means that unsalted butter is typically fresher.

Salt can mask flavors! We may not be able to taste or smell if our butter is off because clever clever salt can mask funky taste and odors. Tricky.

Does butter really go bad? Heck yes it does! Unsalted butter lasts about 1 month in the refrigerator. Salted butter lasts for just over 3 months in the refrigerator (that’s so long, right?). If you think your butter might be off, give it a good sniff. The nose always knows. Also, slice your butter. Is the inside the same color as the outside… or is the outside a darker casing around the butter? Bad butter is two different colors.

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122 comments

It’s like the baking gods read my mind & asked you to write this post. I was standing in the butter section for minutes yesterday pulling out my hair over the salted & unsalted butter & which would be best for my cake experiment. Something told me you would be shaking your head at the salted option so I went for the other. So glad I did & I’m so glad you posted this. Thank you.

Generally there is a little over 1/4 teaspoon of salt in one stick of butter. In one pound of butter there is 1 1/4 teaspoons,(this is Land O Lakes butter) or 1.26 teaspoons in a pound for those of you who want to get that extreme. I buy salted butter because it last I buy 4 to 5 pounds at a time and I just adjust my salt for my recipes and it works very well. The only time I will buy unsalted butter is when my recipe calls for a lesser amount of salt that is in salted butter.

This is a cultural thing though too as in some countries and therefore their traditional recipes salted butter is the answer! Take France for example, most particularly Brittany and Normandy, they would always use salted butter. I for one always use salted butter!

My mom is from France (grew up in Le Mans) and none of my french family use salted butter in their baking. I grew up with the firm belief that unsalted butter is the only acceptable butter to use in baking from my french mother. The standard butter in France is beurre doux (unsalted) and salted butter comes in two types – sel or demi-sel. French butter also has a higher fat content (82% fat compared to our 80% fat) which makes their butter better for pastries.

Love this! Most people look at me blankly when I tell them about salted vs. unsalted. I always bake with unsalted and I think it makes a big difference in the quality of my baked goods. I didn’t know about the freshness angle, though – you’ve taught me something today!

Gosh I love this series :) I actually found some salted butter that mentioned the amount of salt in it (1.7%), which came in handy when I was just a tad short on my unsalted butter while in the midst of baking! But I agree that unsalted butter is definitely better for baking! Curious to see what you’ll write about next…